Museum Hours

There are those rare days when summoning the energy for the latest special delivery film on MUBI - typically a 2 hour plus piece set in a sanatorium where people speak the language backwards, make statues and Marienbad  topiary look athletic, have a fixation with the deep symbolism of a dripping tap and stare silently and endlessly at the middle distance - is just a bit too much. For those occasions there is genre television: crime dramas, comedy dramas and the like.  Rather than the resonant, perfectly formed  madeleine  of the best TV, honed and balanced, these programmes are like a particularly decadent slice of cake. They lure you with the promise of their confection but you rapidly find that the cream was whipped UHT, the ingredients came out of a packet and the fruit is tasteless. This appreciation has been tested during recent experience of watching the British crime dramas Fearless  and In The Dark  and the US dramadies Casual  (on Amazon Prime) and Flake

A new explanation for the delay to my train this afternoon: cows on the line. This did, however, provide some time to reflect on other rather more serious characteristics of modern life than the inconvenience occasioned by the peregrinations of the odd Friesan.  So here are six which seem to me to be particularly pernicious aspects of our current situation.  1.  Libertarianism : otherwise known as letting me do whatever I want and a plague on everyone else. Such a convenient doctrine for the already powerful and utterly malign as a philosophy for the common good with a resolution to remove everything that might be a constraint or require a contribution to the commonweal. This is wholly distinct from liberalism and indeed individualism which are both important and positive. The basic issues that libertarianism always avoid are that a free for all never serves those without agency. The deep structural imbalances in society that fuel inequality have to be collectively addressed